The Maoist raid on
Jehanabad jail shows the increasing firepower of the Naxalites.Ambarish
Dutta reports from Patna

Violence begets violence: A file photo of armed Maoists visiting the Naxal area

THE
strike by the Maoists in Jehanabad was not an isolated incident but a
well-planned attack with clear objectives. And the Maoists were
confident that they could carry it out in the social and political
powder keg that is Bihar. The wounded Maoist, Manoj Kanu, who
succumbed to his injuries on the night of November 16 at Patna Medical
College and Hospital, had reportedly disclosed to the Intelligence
during interrogation that before the attack, over 600 newly recruited
Maoists were trained in arms in the Gurap jungle, near the
Bihar-Jharkhand border, in the presence of Maoists from Andhra
Pradesh.

On the night of November
13, a sentry and an inmate of Jehanabad District Jail were shot dead
and three others were injured as Naxalites looted 16 rifles and
ammunition. Nearly half of the jail’s 650 inmates were missing. They
were either ‘rescued’ by the Naxalites or had managed to flee.
Dreaded Ajay Kanu, state secretary of the CPI (Maoists), was believed
to be among the escapees.

Policemen chase family members of prisoners demonstrating in front of the Jehanabad
district jail

The timing and strategy
of the jailbreak was not merely to free the top Naxal leaders from the
jail. The larger motive of the Naxals was the desire to make their
presence felt on the home turf, in the Gaya-Jehanabad belt. Sustained
crackdown on them by the security forces in the run-up to the poll had
loosened their stranglehold. The district went to the poll in the
first phase. The raid was a bid to whip up a fear psychosis,
especially among the upper castes. Out of 38 districts in Bihar, over
12 are now Naxal-affected in south, central and north Bihar.

Reportedly as many as
2,500 people, on both sides — the Ranvir Sena and the Maoists —
have lost their lives in Bihar during the past 30 years.

In the adjacent
Jharkhand, official figures reveal the numbers of victims in Maoists
attack in 2003, 2004 and 2005 as 128, 171 and 75, respectively.

Sources in the
Intelligence, who submitted their report to the Union Home Ministry
long back, admitted the attempt by the CPI (Maoists), after the People’s
War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) merged in 2004
after a long fratricidal war, to establish a "red corridor."
This, they preferred to call a "liberated zone," stretching
from the "Siliguri corridor" of West Bengal to Andhra
Pradesh, comprising Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Madhya
Pradesh.

A senior Intelligence
official disclosed that after the MCC and the PWG joined hands to form
the CPI(Maoists), under the influence of Maoists from Nepal in 2004,
they had gained by way of firepower, better arms and ammunition and
greater trans-border coordination. "The Indian Maoists reportedly
have over 4,000 trained cadres now who can operate arms, both crude
and sophisticated," the sources said.

Military
precision

The official said,
"Unlike previous such attacks by the Maoists, the attack on
Jehanabad revealed the growing military skills of the Maoists. Like an
Army operation, they had simultaneously attacked three targets — the
jail, police lines and CRPF outposts — as part of their diversionary
tactics, to achieve their primary goal to release their top leader
Ajay Kanu".

It may also be wrong to
equate the Jehanabad episode to that of the first Naxalite upsurge in
West Bengal at Naxalbari in 1967. As Dipankar Bhattacharya, general
secretary of the CPI(ML)—the party which emerged as the biggest
democratic Left force in Bihar after the February Assembly poll—puts
it, "While the Naxalite upsurge between the late 1960s and
mid-1970s in West Bengal and other parts was more explicit in terms of
its political agenda, the Jehanabad and related incidents involving
the CPI(Maoists), on the contrary, speak less of a political agenda
and more of military bravery."

Perhaps it would not
lead to any political solution to the core issue of "land
reforms" and related socio-economic developments at the
grassroots level with the greater participation of the poor and the
downtrodden, including the tribals. "Violence begets violence and
leads to more state repression by diverting the focus from the core
issue of land reforms which was at the root of backwardness and
economic underdevelopment in the Naxalite-affected districts," he
observed.

The views expressed by
Bhattacharya gained credence when none other than the Union Minister
of State for Home and Congress leader, Sriprakash Jaiswal, during his
recent visit to Bihar, admitted that "force alone cannot solve
the Naxalite problem".

Deploying the National
Security Guards (NSG) for the first time in Bihar to combat the
Maoists in the wake of the incident, Jaiswal was of the view that all
the Naxalite-affected states in the country, including Andhra Pradesh
and Jharkhand, should try to implement the West Bengal model of land
reforms executed by the Left Front government there. Jaiswal, while
claiming that land reforms by West Bengal could limit the problem of
Naxalites to a few pockets there, did not explain why the Naxalite-related
problem persisted in the Left-ruled West Bengal despite the
implementation of land reforms way back in the late 1970s and the
early 1980s after the Left Front came to power in 1977.

Way back in 1986, the
then Congress Chief Minister Bindeshwari Dube had crushed an otherwise
peaceful congregation of villagers at Arwal in Bihar when the SP, C.R.
Kaswan, opened fire on unarmed villagers and killed 20 persons who had
gathered at a local library.

The meeting was convened
by "party unity," a faction of the Naxalites, and the firing
on villagers who had gathered in the library was still being viewed as
a turning point in the land reforms-related agitation in Bihar. This
massacre is compared to that of "Jallianwala Bagh."

It has taken almost 20
years, since the 1986 "Arawal massacre," for the Congress to
realise that "use of force" cannot be the ultimate solution
to the Naxalite problem in the country. Unless people at the
grassroots gain by extensive land reforms and related developments
work.

Trail
of violence

On January 5, 2005, the district police chief of
Mungher,
K.C. Surendra Babu, was killed by Naxalites.

In the second major attack, on June 23, 2005, over 200
Maoists went on a rampage in Madhuban, east Champaran district,
Bihar. They looted many arms and set a police station on fire.

A total of 510 persons, 295 civilians, 89 security
personnel and 126 Naxalites were killed in Naxalite violence
till July 31, 2005.

On September 3, 2005, the Maoists blew up a
mine-protected vehicle in their bastion, in Dantewada district,
Chhattisgarh, killing 24 policemen.

On November 11, 2005, the Home Guards Training Centre in
Giridh was raided and 185 rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition
were looted.

In the last 15 years, in cases related to the killing of
nearly 1,000 persons, not a single Ranvir sena activist has been
punished by a court in Bihar.

Caste
equations

The sheer magnitude of
the attack has thrown up challenges for the security forces as well as
prised open old schisms of caste. There is an attempt to generalise
the incidents of clashes involving the Naxalites and the Ranvir Sena
along caste lines.

It is true that the
Ranvir Sena was formed in 1994 as a private army of the upper castes
to protect their land against Maoists’ "attempts to capture the
same in the name of the Dalits." There have been massacres like
killing of 59 Dalits at Lakhimpur Bathe in 1997, 21 at Bathanitola in
1996, 23 at Shankarbigha in 1999, 12 at Narayanpur in 1999, 33 at
Mianpur in 2000.

In retaliation, 33
persons of the upper castes were killed by the MCCin 1999, in Senari.
The fast land reforms movement in Bihar was initiated by Sahajanand
Saraswari, who represented the upper castes, under the then Kisan
Sabha of the CPI between the 1950s and 60s.

Why could not the Kisan
Sabha, after spearheading the first leg of land reforms movement in
the 1970s, lead the same movement for the "ultimate land
reforms" which bring real socio-economic empowerment to the
Dalits and OBCs? This, perhaps, speaks volumes for the stagnation of
the CPI in Bihar after the 1970s, and the emergence of the CPI(ML) as
the biggest democratic Left force in Bihar after the the February
Assembly poll.

Regional
forces

An economics graduate
from Pune and a law student, Vivek Verma, who was born and brought up
in Patna, says, "It is true that the emergence of Lalu Prasad,
Ramvilas Paswan or Mayawati can always be viewed as the emergence of
Dalits and OBCs as greater stake-holders in the power-sharing process.
But to what extent has their emergence given the Dalits, OBCs and
tribals at the grassroots the benefits of socio-economic
development?"

The victims of the
Mianpur massacre by the Ranvir Sena in Bihar in 2000 were Yadavs,
despite the fact that the RJD was in power in the state. Retired
advocate of the Patna High Court, Jagdish Prasad, said that the report
of the Ashish Das Committee, formed in 1998 to inquire into the
massacre of 59 Dalits in Lakhimpur Bathe in 1997, was yet to see the
light of day.

Could the killing of the
maximum number of Dalits and the OBCs during the RJD rule, preceded by
the formation of the Ranvir Sena, be viewed as a retaliation by the
upper castes against the emergence of Lalu Prasad? The failure of the
RJD and other forces, who claim to be catering to the causes of the
Dalits and the OBCs, to protect the victims of the Ranvir Sena under
their banner, directly or indirectly, helped the Maoists to capitalise
on it. North Bihar shares the longest border with Nepal (643 km), and
through rivers (Gandak, Koshi) and roads, the Maoists from Nepal could
always have a link with the Maoists in central and south Bihar
districts that are well linked to Maoists-affected Hazaribagh and
Giridh in Jharkhand. They are,in turn, connected to Puruluia in West
Bengal, which is linked to Midnapore, the gateway of West Bengal to
Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. The danger to the internal security of the
country posed by the Maoists is underlined by the first-ever
deployment of the NSG after the Jehanabad episode.

Intelligence agencies
are aware that the "Siliguri corridor" in West Bengal can be
accessed from Nepal and Bangladesh, and geo-politically, too, the same
corridor provides the only "rail and road link" with the
North-East.

Last year, the Assam
Government cautioned the Centre against the reported attempt by the
ISI to forge a link between the ULFA,the KLO of West Bengal and the
Maoists, with the help of Jehadi groups operating from the Bangladesh
soil.